Well, once again, it’s been a while since I’ve posted anything here. I’ve been working on what I think will be an exciting new addition to my website (stay tuned for more on that soon.) However, as I was watching the Sunday morning political talk shows, my wife mentioned something that motivated me to write this post, which is one that I’ve been meaning to do for a while. While Facebooking (can that really be a verb?), she came across a new Facebook group with the same title as this post. After rolling my eyes (as I often do in these situations), I realized (also as I often do in these situations) that the creator of that group– and those who subscribe to the explicit as well as implicit sentiment of it– probably just doesn’t have the back-story to understand why things are the way they are and that my initial reaction made me just as guilty of jumping to conclusions as that person was. Whoever created the group is obviously frustrated– they even say they’re “pissed off” at the “stupid” traffic lights, and I sympathize with their frustration. But, as is often the case, there’s more to the story than meets the eye, and maybe if folks understood how things got to be as they are, they might be more forgiving. This posting is an attempt at that.

This past Monday, the Alamo Regional Mobility Authority (ARMA) held a public meeting to show their plans for the US 281/Loop 1604 interchange. The interchange is being funded primarily with federal economic stimulus funds and therefore will be built toll-free, but that’s not enough for local outspoken toll-opponent Terri Hall. She had a lot to say about the project on her MySA.com blog yesterday. I submitted a response to it last night, but as she has to approve it, it hasn’t been posted yet. (But I’m not really surprised.) So I’m going to respond to her here on my turf. Because her comments went all over the map, I’m going to break this response up into two posts: one about the costs of the interchange (today), and one about the environmental clearance it is getting (tomorrow).